The High School Dropout Who Made $2B & Bought an NBA Team

My First Million

Hubspot

Entrepreneurship, Investing, Business

4.8 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 5 November 2025

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Get the guide to build your own unicorn billion dollar biz: https://clickhubspot.com/fgk Episode 761: Shaan Puri ( ⁠https://x.com/ShaanVP⁠ ) sits down with Ryan Smith ( https://x.com/ryanqualtrics ) – the high school dropout who built an $8B company and bought an NBA team. — Show Notes: (0:00) 1.9 GPA to $2B (9:47) Starting Qualtrics (14:02) Focus (24:00) How to be top 1% at sales (26:17) Turning down $500M (31:37) Working backwards (3814) Buying an NBA team (43:51) The 9 most important minutes of the day — Links: • Qualtrics - https://www.qualtrics.com/ • Utah Jazz - https://www.nba.com/jazz/ — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is Ryan Smith, a guy who went from a 1.9 GPA high school dropout to a $2 billion net worth. But this isn't your normal dropout story. At some point, you have a conversation with yourself, like, okay, I've got to make this happen. Yeah, I've got to find a gear that I've never used to before. When he dropped out, he had no plan, no money, and nowhere to live. There's a great story about the early days of Qualtricks and focus. We were religious about it, and it was actually an incredible forcing function for me. At some point you could offer $500 million to sell the company, and you turned it down. Every other person I would talk to about this offer was like, take it and run. Right. You're building it from your family's basement all the way to the end zone, basically. Sell for $8 billion. You end up going public. I didn't do anything else when I was doing Qualtrux. I didn't invest. I didn't sit on boards. No side hustles. No side hustles. Nothing except for hoops. What's it like to now own an NBA team? That's insane. My philosophy was don't blink.
0:55.8	Just go.
0:59.8	I feel like I can rule the world.
1:02.0	I know I could be what I want to.
1:04.9	I put my all in it like no days off.
1:07.3	On a road, let's travel, never looking back.
1:09.4	I want to start with this.
1:10.7	Like, you know, you've done what kids like me dream up.
1:14.5	It's like I build a successful company with my family, no less,
1:18.5	become the super successful guy, billionaire, NBA team owner.
1:21.2	You live this really interesting life.
1:22.6	What's cool is that if we rewind the clock,
1:26.4	you were a guy who dropped out of high school
1:29.7	and had a 1.9 GPA in high school.
1:32.8	So going from a 1.9 GPA to like,
1:36.0	I don't know, a $2 billion net worth,
1:37.6	that's a pretty big jump.
1:39.0	We hear these stories where it's like,
1:41.4	Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, they were at Harvard, and then they dropped
1:44.8	out with this big grand idea and it came to fruition. That's not your story at all. So let's do
1:50.3	the origin. Can you take us back, you know, your 14, 15, 16, 17 years old? What was going on in
1:55.0	your life at that time? Yeah, I mean, it's no secret. Like, my parents split up when I was like
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Hubspot, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Hubspot and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.